The Birth (and Death) of an Idea

I met my best friend, June Dal, at a writer’s group meeting back in 1987. June introduced me to Pern fan clubs in the 90’s. Back then, you created a persona (or more) and wrote stories. As you got to know other members, you used their characters in your stories as well. More friendships blossomed for both of us (mostly the same people). However, clubs such as that are largely groups held together by the leadership. When the leaderships change, the group changes. It’s a natural cycle we’d seen multiple times. One by one, the groups changed and my and my friends’ interests lapsed.

However, we missed the fun of writing with other people. We regretted not being able to explore story lines we were developing for the various characters, or seeing what our friends were really going to do with theirs. But, we no longer were part of the club environment we had all enjoyed.

After some months of lamenting this loss, June and I sat down to create our own world, one we could write in with our friends again. Since most all of our friends came to us through Pern, we looked there to do the world building.

We talked frankly about what we enjoyed about the Pern fan stories we’d written, what about the world we found good story material. What we discovered is that we liked having our heroes be the “outcasts” of society. We liked having some kind of animal bonded to our characters, and that being what made them outcasts. We liked having a strict social structure, with distrust between different levels of society. We wanted a world-wide threat that our heroes were destined to combat.

Then we talked about what we wanted to be different. We wanted it to be Fantasy. We wanted there to be magic, furthermore, we wanted Good and Evil magic.

Even with what we liked, we changed. We didn’t want bonded animals that could be ridden. Dragons, horses, they’d all been done. And, frankly, we hated how many Pernese fan writers treated their dragons like cars and not characters. So, we decided we wanted smaller creatures, perhaps one that could fit on a person’s shoulder. We decided to base our creatures, the tereges, on the archaeopteryx. Tweaked, of course.

We made magic the ultimate corruptive agent, with the tereges the only “filter” to keep people good. Being magic users would make our heroes outcasts, but they would be the only way to defeat the corrupted magic users.

We decided to very loosely base the society on the Sun King’s France, so many different writers would draw from the same source for names, etc.

Literally in an afternoon, we created the basis of the world we called Deau. We got home and emailed a few of our friends to see what they thought. This was a Friday night.

They were very excited at the prospect. So excited, in fact, that by Sunday night, we had our first story submission in the new world.

And so Children of the Vortex came into being.

In about three years, we put out 6 issues of 100+ pages (with full color covers, perma-bound and interior illustrations). At our height, there were 23 authors actively writing stories in Deau. June and I were doing all the editing, all the coordinating story lines through all the various writers, keeping the world consistent, guiding and approving new ideas and creations in the world, and physically producing the print runs. We went to MediaWest Con a few times to market the series. We hosted a Fete party to get the various writers together, most of whom had never met in real life.

All this on top of writing our own stories and keeping up the day jobs, families–y’know, real life.

It was exhilarating. It was 50-70 hours of work a week. And we loved it.

Then something happened to the price of printing. Between Issue #6 and #7, the price jumped from $125-150 a print run to over $500. Between June and I, we couldn’t afford that. Even with help from the other authors, it was too expensive.

In 1999, we tried putting an issue on CD. It was a miserable failure. Not even our own authors liked the change.